Prospectus
Disciplining the Past:
AHA Presidential Addresses in Context
As reflected in my earlier review of Web scholarship, I am
particularly interested in exploring how hypermedia and hypertext can be used to construct
new forms of interpretation. I would like to use the texts of the AHA presidential addresses as the basis for an
analysis of the production and reproduction of notions of historical scholarship over time.
While coding them, I was particularly taken with the evidence they provide of the oedipal
nature of the profession, and how hypermedia could serve to open up the bi-directional
nature of their discourse. Throughout the speeches, one finds the authors arguing with the
failed examples of their predecessors, but also projecting their own notion of where the
profession seemed to be headed and developing arguments against these images of the future.
I think hypertext provides a unique opportunity to place the reader into an interpretive
space where the juxtaposition of text can visually represent the interconnection of past,
present, and future. Playing the potential futures off against past regrets and present
purposes provides an ideal way to demonstrate the limited and limiting nature of their
discourse.
In addition to the textual analysis, I would frame the words in a statistical argument that
demonstrates the narrowness of their arguments. As reflected in one of the more grotesque
examples of the projection type of argument—Carl
Bridenbaugh’s attack on the entry of women, immigrants, and “lower
class” students into the profession—the discourse in the addresses tend to
reflect the arguments of a narrow band of elite white males in the profession. To date only
five women and two non-whites have made it to the speaker’s rostrum, and since the
Association became an explicitly academic organization around 1920, almost 95 percent of the
presidents were at elite research universities. To reinforce a key strand of my
argument—that this had a deforming affect on the discourse and the profession—I
would like to weave into the analysis some of the comparative data I have been developing
about the profession, to demonstrate that the exclusions from the presidential podium
reflect a larger problem in the profession. On this level, I am particularly interested in
exploring the use of animated statistical charts to demonstrate some of the developments,
and put in pauses to stop the advance of the data at key points to highlight significant
interpretive moments.
Hypertext seems to provide a unique opportunity to demonstrate how the elites in one field
have used constructions of the past and the future in an attempt to discipline their
profession.
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